jotsheet

If you’re a user of Movable Type, listen up. Your rebuilds are getting slower. It takes users forever to post a comment. You’re getting frustrated.

The reason? The open-ended design of MT’s default Category Archive template. The solution? Peter R. Wood’s smarter Category Archives.

Why Category Archives in Movable Type are a problem

Here’s the story, in a nutshell:

1. Movable Type ships with Category Archive templates that include the MTEntryBody of every entry in a given category.
2. You, the ambitious blogger, begin to clog the Intarweb with worthless posts to your MT blog. These posts are archived to your category archives. These pages get huge.
3. Each time you post an entry or your user comments on an entry, the category archive associated with that entry must be rebuilt. This means…
   • If you post an entry in Category A, which has 2 entries in it, it will rebuild quickly and won’t be a problem.
   • If you post an entry in Category B, which has 200 entries in it, it will take forever.
4. You get more frustrated.
5. Your users roll their eyes as they wait for category archive pages with 300 KB worth of text to load.

Peter R. Wood’s Category Archive tweak solves this. It’s the silver bullet. It’s creates (1) faster rebuilds and (2) more usable pages.

The idea

It’s very simple: Instead of including the entry body of everything in your category archives, do this for the last 10 entries. For everything else, just include the title and a link to the Individual Entry Archive. Not only does this improve rebuild time, it creates a smaller, friendlier page. You can see it in action at my category archives or Peter’s.

Some code for ya

Since everyone’s MT configuration is different, I’ll just include some pseudocode, generic-ish snippets here to get you on your way. In summary, the last few entries should include the MTEntryBody, while the rest should not. I did some informal testing to see whether rebuild times were affected by including comment- or trackback-specific tags, which I thought might increase rebuild time since they’re drawn from a separate table in MySQL, but this seemed to have a neglible effect. (If anyone here is more knowledgeable about the relationship between MySQL table structure and MT rebuild times, please speak up.)

Results

Since implementing this change, I’ve realized a 50-70% decrease in the time required to post a new entry, update an entry, or post a comment.

Other notes

I would also like to note that in a previous complaint about the slow rebuilding/MT Category Archive issue, I tagged the source of the problem as “poor application design.” That’s wrong. It has nothing to do with application design and everything to do with the default template.

Also, Anil Dash suggests converting only Category Archives to dynamic templates. This is a pretty good thought. It doesn’t work well for me because my MT installation is (a) very tweaked and much old-style plugin-driven and (b) extremely modular, wherein the Index, Date-Based, and Category templates reuse multiple components. However, for most users of MT—provided they’re pretty technically minded—this is an option.

Finally, if you are using dynamic publishing in MT, you should take a look at paginating via Smarty. This will get you the same kind of user-friendly pages that the above static template tweak affords. However, in my opinion, it’s hard to justify that much work with the minimal extra ROI.

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